Part One: A Madhouse Against the Nazis: the Story of François Tosquelles and Saint-Albans

Margaret talks with Allison Raskin about the antifascist asylum in France that armed partisans and reinvented psychiatry.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People who did cool stuff.
You're weekly reminder that when there's bad things happening, people
try to do good things with it. And this is
like an extra that this week episode. But first, I'm
your host, Margaret Hill Joy. And second, but not in
order of lower priority, but just literally in a temporal
order of who's introduced is my guest, Alison Raskin. Hi,

(00:28):
how are you?

Speaker 3 (00:29):
I'm so good. It's great to see you.

Speaker 2 (00:32):
It's good to see you too. And I hear that tomorrow,
not tomorrow as we record, but tomorrow as a release.
Do you have a book coming out? Are you the
Alison Raskin, the New York Times bestselling author of a
new rom com Save the Date that comes out tomorrow.

Speaker 4 (00:49):
You know what I am, and I'm freaking out about
it in both good and anxiety driven ways.

Speaker 2 (00:58):
Book releases are weird because like you have to be
like really really really excited as it all builds up
and then it collapses so fast, you know, and like,
I mean the book has a long tail and everyone
and it still matters and stuff, but I don't know.

Speaker 4 (01:11):
Yeah, you're like for like years, you're like working on
this thing and you're like, Okay, this is going to
change everything for me. Yeah, and then sometimes people just
enjoy it and then your life stays the same, which
is also wonderful.

Speaker 2 (01:23):
But yeah, that is usually what happens with the most books.
And then also, of course, like I would guess how
long ago did you finish this book writing it?

Speaker 4 (01:33):
Well, because like you know about the whole Like I
don't know when copy ed it's finished, but I know
I had to get like my first full draft was
due in December of twenty twenty three, and so then
maybe like a few months after.

Speaker 3 (01:48):
That it got finalized. Yeah, it's been a wait.

Speaker 2 (01:51):
That's the thing that's funny about books is they're like,
by the time it comes out and everyone's suddenly excited
about it, you're usually like writing the next thing, and
you're like, yeah, totally the.

Speaker 3 (02:00):
Next thing, and I'm behind on the next thing.

Speaker 2 (02:02):
So it's me too, I am currently behind on a thing. Yeah,
have you seen the good meme exactly for you? It's
the dog and the House on fire that usually says
like this is fine or whatever, but instead it says,
so I have a book coming out.

Speaker 4 (02:21):
And also because my other book, my nonfiction book got
kind of screwed up with when it came out.

Speaker 3 (02:27):
It came out six months ago, and so I'm.

Speaker 4 (02:29):
Like, people are probably like Al's and we just we
just went through this with you, like we're not ready
for this level of self promotion back to back.

Speaker 2 (02:37):
I like to think that people just sort of accept
it as like, well, that's her job. Like I hope
that because that's what I have to do constantly. Yeah,
I'm currently not in a publicity cycle for a book,
because I just finished a publicity cycle for a book.
But like, wait, how do I make this tie into
what we're talking about today? Books matter? Escapism is genuinely

(03:01):
a useful thing. I think it's Tolkien has a quote
that then's paraphrased by Legwin about how imagine telling a
soldier in a pow camp that they shouldn't try to escape?
Why do people talk trash on escapism? We should be
able to escape? And so this idea that like reading

(03:22):
something that's lighthearted or serious, but like I'm guessing since
it's a rom comm it's like somewhat lighthearted, you know,
and like I don't know, there's an actual value to that,
is what I'll say.

Speaker 3 (03:35):
I think that's so true.

Speaker 4 (03:36):
And I'm someone that like I steer clear of like
really sad books and really sad TV and movies because
I don't know, I experienced that so much in my
real life that like, when I've engaging with like narrative content,
I want to like tap into like my more positive emotions.

Speaker 2 (03:54):
It makes sense to me. I like writing both. But
I really like writing kind of like pulpy fun adventure,
even though adventure is usually a description of bad things happening,
you know, like like violence is like actually really bad,
it hurts everyone involved, but we're like fun, you know. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (04:13):
That also, like with the Rob Cob it was inspired
by my broken engagement, and so it's like, oh, I'm
turning like one of the most traumatizing experiences of my
life into this like fun love story, which is like
also kind of a cool way of like reclaiming the
narrative around it. But it sometimes as a writer, you're like, oh,
I don't have anything to write about until the next

(04:34):
terrible thing happens to me.

Speaker 2 (04:36):
Yeah. The first several stories I sold were about some
of the worst things that have ever happened to me
just turned into like fiction, and and then at some
point I was like, what am I gonna do when
I can't like just stare at the abyss of my
soul anymore? But this story, okay, the story that I'm
gonna tell you this week, this story has it all.

(04:57):
This story is like if someone were to come up
with the ultimate cool people who did cool stuff episode,
it would maybe be this story. And one of the
things in this story is maybe my favorite love story
that I've ever told on this show.

Speaker 3 (05:11):
I'm very excited and honored to be here for this.

Speaker 1 (05:14):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (05:14):
No, I well it ties into the last thing I
had you on, but first or third, depending on how
we're counting things. We also have producers like Sophie Lichterman,
who's not with us today on recording but is our producer.
And also Rory is our audio engineer, and everyone wants
to say hi to Rory. Hi Rori, Hi Riri. And
our theme music was written for Spyon Woman and this week, Okay,

(05:37):
normally I do the like, have you heard about this thing?
And it is possible that you have, but I haven't
talked to anyone who's heard of this thing besides my
friend who told me about it in the first place.
This week We're going to be talking about the San
Alban Hospital in rural France, like Saint Alban is how
I would want to pronounce it, and I'm not going
to pronouncing French hospital in rural France, where patients and

(06:03):
doctors collectively resisted fascist occupation and while they were at it,
they radically reinvented psychiatry and psychotherapy. We are going to
talk in particular about its founder, who is either an
anti authoritarian communist or an an archo syndicalist or an
arc of communist, depending on what source you read, whose

(06:24):
name was Francois Toscaeus, who fought in the Spanish Civil
War before fleeing to France, fleeing one fascist occupation to
find himself square in the middle of another one.

Speaker 4 (06:35):
I mean, that has to be so annoying, like I
can't like you must just be like really.

Speaker 2 (06:41):
I know, and I think about it a lot when
I'm like, for some weird reason, a lot of trans
people and other people who are marginalized or like thinking
about like I wonder if the US is the place
to live, you know, oh, definitely, And I think a
lot about the people who let fled France or like
some of the other people in this story fled Italy
or Germany or whatever and then ended up in another

(07:01):
country that was also Fascist occupied very shortly. But the
reason I'm having you on for this one a few
months ago you probably remember, but I'm going to remind
the audience. We ran some episodes about alternative models by
and four people living with mental illness. You were the

(07:21):
guest on episodes about Fountain House and the clubhouse model
for helping folks when they are out of a mental
health hospital, and the core idea of that model, the
clubhouse model, is to break down hierarchies like between the
sick and the well, the patient and the doctor. It
is a model that is designed to help people build

(07:42):
agency by giving them an actual stake not just in
their own healing, but their own stake in the entire facility,
the entire clubhouse, and that model has since spread around
the world. Then, a couple weeks later, for people who've
been listening a lot, I covered Bethel House, which is
a com organization in Japan that takes things a step further,

(08:03):
or maybe in a step in a different direction, and
has built a sort of entire society that runs parallel
to mainstream Japanese culture, and how they developed this idea
of self study by which patients themselves become the experts
on their own ailments and treatments, and how that idea
has spread again across the world. The other thing that

(08:24):
came up in both of those episodes that ties into
this one too is how maybe rather than the collectives
of patients needing to learn from the healthy world, the
healthy world has a lot to learn from people who
are dealing with stuff. Not because they have this problem,
but because they are dealing with the problem. They are

(08:44):
like facing something and dealing with it head on.

Speaker 1 (08:47):
Yes.

Speaker 2 (08:48):
The simplest, clear example of that I can use is
that when we did the Bethel House, the Japanese group,
they developed a disaster preparedness framework for their members and
for the local town soon enough that was inclusive of
both mental and physical disability. Basically like, they're kind of
within the tsunami warning zone, right on a coast.

Speaker 4 (09:09):
I'm so afraid of tsunamis. That's one of my major triggers.

Speaker 3 (09:12):
I don't know why.

Speaker 2 (09:13):
Oh interesting, do you live anywhere near a coast?

Speaker 3 (09:16):
I don't, Well, I do.

Speaker 4 (09:17):
But it's very funny because my husband was like making
fun of me for being afraid of tsunamis. He was like,
a Tsunami's never gonna happen in LA And then I
was like, John, there's literally tsunami warning signs that we
walk by, Like.

Speaker 2 (09:30):
Oh, yeah, no, you all might have a tsunami. You
probably won't.

Speaker 4 (09:33):
Yeah, Like there's signs that say leaving tsunami zone.

Speaker 2 (09:37):
Yeah, like earthquake and fire are more immediate concerns, but like, definitely,
you're not out of the tsunami woods.

Speaker 3 (09:45):
I'm one mile from the ocean. Yeah, that's as close
as I'll get.

Speaker 2 (09:49):
Yeah. I have reoccurring I don't even want to say nightmares,
but dreams about tsunamis, or specifically I would have called
them tidal waves when I was a kid. Oh yeah,
Like I have like dreams about like being kind of
near the ocean and then like usually I'm either like
watching the wave come and just being like, well I
had a good run, or I like am in a

(10:13):
house and I like the house gets like under the
wave and then I just have to keep moving up
and up and up in the house. I don't know.

Speaker 4 (10:22):
I think that mine came. My fear around this came
from some movie I saw that had like this intense
opening scene of like a whole community in the tsunami. Yeah,
it's like those images just like all over.

Speaker 2 (10:35):
Yeah. No, it makes sense. And if you lived where
folks lived in Japan, which I can't remember the name
of the town right now because that's not the script
I'm reading from right now. But they, the folks at
Bethel House, came up with a plan first just for themselves.
They have all these community houses of people who are
you know, mental and sometimes physically disabled, and they're like, oh, well,

(10:55):
how will we take care of ourselves and each other?
And so they came up with this plan about how
to know exactly who had what needs and how to
get everyone up the mountain and take care of people right.
And so then they started working with the city council
around that plan and it got enacted town wide, and
then it served as the model for Japan's official disaster preparedness,

(11:19):
specifically to include disabled people.

Speaker 4 (11:22):
That's amazing because that's a huge issue. I mean, I
know in our country, but I assume around the world.

Speaker 2 (11:27):
Yeah, especially when you're like an island nation, you know, Oh,
but there's disability and preparedness. Yeah, totally.

Speaker 4 (11:32):
Yeah, Like there's just like there's no plan and we
saw that, like have huge ramifications with the LA fires. Yeah,
and it's people don't take into account disabled people in
like any aspect of society really.

Speaker 2 (11:47):
Yeah. Absolutely, And I would meet a lot of people
who are like, oh, I you know I have trouble walking,
or I have the following needs or you know, I
need a thyroid pill every day, So like I'm not
even going to bother preparing. But then after that, I
would start meeting people in the disability preparedness community, and
I realize that the way that folks have been organizing,

(12:07):
they don't have anything to learn from us. We have
a lot to learn from them. Absolutely, the like actual
mutual aid communities that people have built because they they
need to, Like who better to learn from than people
for whom preparedness is required for them to interact with
the ablest world that's around them, you know. And that's

(12:27):
a theme we're going to continue to explore this week,
not specifically, does it. I love talking about preparedness, So
that's the angle I use for that particular part of it.
But instead that you know, this isn't about like, oh,
we help take care of those poor people, but instead like, oh,
people are doing amazing stuff. In the book Storming, Bedlam, Madness, Utopia,

(12:50):
and Revolt by Sasha Warren, the author states quote, we
have grown accustomed to reading about asylum psychiatry as the
project of states seeking new, subtler means of social control. However,
at its points of origin in France and England, psychiatry
was among the most radical and promising of the reform

(13:12):
movements that proliferated during the Industrial and French revolutions. Unlike
the reformers opening prisons or schools, its founders were motivated
by a revolutionary approach to sociability that resembled nothing so
closely as the socialist utopias of Robert Owen and Charles
fay Fourier. I don't know pronounce the guy's name is
probably British, so they probably pronounced all the letters, to

(13:36):
continue the quote. In the early nineteenth century, psychiatrists in
the moral treatment movement championed a therapeutic model that not
only acted as if the mad person was human, but
that in the best environmental and architectural conditions, immersed in
a consciously and collectively organized social world, engaged in meaningful
reproductive labour in common, the asylum could prefigure a more

(14:00):
perfect world for all.

Speaker 3 (14:02):
That's a very different understanding of what mental institutions have
been in America.

Speaker 2 (14:08):
Yeah, this is not me being like obviously institutions have
been a positive force in society, you know.

Speaker 4 (14:15):
Like, but I was thinking about what you were saying earlier.
I have a master's in psychology and do a lot
in the mental health field. And one of the things
I love the most learning in school that like we
learn like I don't know, my first semester was that
the client is the expert in their own life. Yeah, totally,
And so many clinicians, I feel like, don't operate under

(14:39):
that model. Yeah, but they know themselves better than will
ever know them, and their context and their resources and
their capacities.

Speaker 2 (14:48):
Yeah. One of the things I loved about the Bethelhouse
group in particular was that the self study thing that
they promoted wasn't just it was it starts from the
position of like, Okay, this is your lived experience that
you know it better than I ever will. But then
it was like, all right, and so here's tools to
like systematize that and introduce it into the scientific method

(15:10):
and like build collectively knowledge. So it's not just you're
not just the expert on your own version of this suffering,
but you're able to become the expert along with other
people who deal with it of like the problem itself.
You know. I love that. So the place that I'm
going to describe this week, I was thinking about this.

(15:31):
I was just on the phone with my friend. Like
one of the things I do before I record, as
I usually call one of my friends and kind of
just like tell the story to them really quickly, like
so that I find the parts that I'm the most
excited about, right, the parts that make me start talking
really fast and getting really excited. And one of the
things I was talking about with my friend was that
it's like, I'm going to describe a place in one

(15:54):
of the worst possible environments, which is France under a
Nazi occupation, in a place of people who are being eugenicized, right,
Like nazis not famously very good on mental health, and
yet there are elements of this thing that I'm describing
where I suspect that, like some people would be happier

(16:15):
there than they are now because of community. I'm not
trying to be like it's good, actually right, But there's
a thing that comes up a lot. Rebecca Soulnet writes
about this a lot, about like the surprising utopia that
comes up during disaster and crisis because people actually have
meaning and work together.

Speaker 1 (16:32):
You know.

Speaker 4 (16:33):
Yeah, I one of my professors said something. You know,
I was like, how are we ever going to like
address climate change? You know, like are we ever going
to like get our stuff together? But he was like,
what we need is like a common enemy. He was like,
we would need like to have aliens for like humans

(16:54):
to start to see humans as the as the tribe
rather than these like smaller sections.

Speaker 2 (17:01):
And I hope dearly that that is not right. That
is my dearest hope is that we can finally see
that like people are people and you know.

Speaker 3 (17:10):
Without the aliens coming.

Speaker 2 (17:12):
Yeah, but you know what, we can all unite against advertising.

Speaker 3 (17:17):
Yes, yeah, here they are.

Speaker 2 (17:28):
And we're back. Boy. I sure am willing to set
aside all my differences in order to support all of
the advertisers who on that it's a positive version. All
of the advertisers are so great. I love all of them. Anyway,
where better to start a story about people seeking a
better world? For all than Catalonia, the occupied region of

(17:50):
Spain that continues to fight for autonomy and independence to
this day. We're going to start our story with our
main protagonist this week is a man named Francois to
Scaus sometimes france Esque to Scaus Francesque is the Catalan
version of the same name, and so even though he's
mostly remembered as Francois in history books and stuff, he

(18:13):
was pretty into being Catalan. So I'm going to mostly
use france Esque throughout. I'm guessing he preferred the name,
but I don't know. I actually think he kind of
didn't care. That's what I mostly think.

Speaker 3 (18:24):
Why do you think that?

Speaker 2 (18:25):
Because he was really into being a refugee, He was
really into the idea. He actually he has all these
quotes about like making people work to understand you because
you're speaking their language in an accented way. Creates a
more real connection with people because they actually have to
think about what you say. And he's like really into

(18:46):
like the primary right under all other rights is the
right to roam, the right to be in different places.

Speaker 3 (18:53):
Oh that's beautiful.

Speaker 2 (18:54):
Yeah, No, I really like him. I like kept waiting
for the like turn where he was like actually bad.
But I have found it. This is like one of
the most unabashedly like and we at some point you
should look up a photo of him. He's just this
is a kind of like round faced man who's bawling
up top and has a mustache and glasses and like
he's so sweet looking. I don't know whatever. Anyway, I love.

Speaker 4 (19:16):
I love when there's one person where you'd like you
just get to the end of their whole biography and you're.

Speaker 3 (19:21):
Like, that was okay, I get into it. I didn't
freak out at one point.

Speaker 1 (19:26):
I know.

Speaker 2 (19:27):
I'm sure he did something bad. I haven't found it yet,
and I have read a bunch of different people's takes
on it. A lot of the writing about him is
trapped behind my lack of speaking French. Oh yeah, but
I found everything I could, and I auto translated some
other stuff. I don't rely on auto translations for anything
besides like background material or like just like trying to

(19:49):
get context on someone, like some minor character where there's
like a you know, article about them in Castilian but
not in English or whatever.

Speaker 1 (19:57):
You know.

Speaker 2 (19:59):
So Francesque Toscaeus was born in nineteen twelve in Catalonia
in a city called Ruiz, and I'm usually when I
mispronounced things that are French, I'm like, yeah, I don't
really care. I'm genuinely sorry. I'm gonna mispronounce all the
Catalan in this piece, but I'm going to his parents
at least later. Run a Haberdashy so selling sewing supplies.

(20:22):
I believe I always thought Haberdashy was a hat maker,
but it's not.

Speaker 4 (20:27):
It's it's like definitely a word I've heard, but I
don't think I ever had any idea what it meant.

Speaker 2 (20:31):
Yeah, I just assumed it was a hat maker. I
have no idea why I thought that, and then I
looked it up and it was like, it is not.
It is a sewing shop. I also think that they're
like selling made things like dresses and things, but I'm
not entirely certain, which would actually put them in a
really cool lineage with like a bunch of other really
cool There's been like a bunch of dressmakers within radical
history that I've covered before in the show.

Speaker 3 (20:52):
That's so cool. I wonder what that's about.

Speaker 2 (20:55):
I know, I think, okay, I think part of it
is that a lot of women who are independent end
up political radicals. And if you're in the nineteenth century
and you're an independent woman and you need enough money
to raise your family, you might become a dressmaker.

Speaker 3 (21:11):
You know that makes sense.

Speaker 2 (21:13):
Lucy Parsons was a dressmaker, and she's one of the reasons.
The death of her husband is the reason we have
like May Day, the celebration of the first of May
as a labor holiday, and that was the very first
episode of this show. If you want to hear me
talk about Haymarket.

Speaker 3 (21:28):
That's so cool. Do you celebrate it every May First?

Speaker 2 (21:32):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (21:32):
No?

Speaker 2 (21:32):
Yeah? Actually May Day is like the anarchists and like
a lot of other political radicals will have big events
on May First and have like usually I really like
it because it's our day of like picnics and stuff.
Usually we all get together because we're like protesting, and
sometimes we do on May Day, but more often than
that we just like have like fucking games and like
people like give readings and that's so lovely. Last year,

(21:56):
I think I spoke at the the student occupation in
Chapel Hill about the history of May Day, and I
don't know, I like May First. Okay, So his family
are a Narcos syndicalists, which is a powerful social movement
at the time in Spain, especially in Catalonia, and anarcosynticalists

(22:18):
fight for a socialist society without the state or hierarchy.
It's possible that his grandparents were an arcosyndicalust too, and
maybe their parents before them. I don't know. I just
know that there were a lot of multi generational anarchist
families at that time and place, which I find really cool.
I have read. This is not the most important thing

(22:39):
about this man, but it is a thing I spent
no small amount of time trying to figure out. I
have read an incredible number of conflicting reports about him
specifically and how he grew up and what his political
affiliation was. He was either an anti authoritarian communist like
a Marxist who doesn't like Stalin, which is a very
reasonable position, or he was an anarchist communist or an
archosyndicalist or whatever. I can promise you he's cool either way.

(23:01):
I couldn't promise you exactly how he identified.

Speaker 3 (23:05):
We know he wasn't fiscally conservative.

Speaker 2 (23:08):
Yeah totally. Yeah. He wasn't a big fan of Stalin
or other dictators. Yeah, yeah, Okay, he was one of
those kids who grew up knowing exactly what he wanted
to do. He wanted to be a psychiatrist, and he
wanted to destroy capitalism. Those are his things. Starting at

(23:29):
the age of seven, he went with his father to
learn about psychiatry from the nearby Paramatta Institute. I am
uncertain exactly how the seven year old ends up going
to the psychiatric institution to learn. I don't know whether
the dad was a patient. I don't believe the dad
was a doctor, but I'm not sure. I think he
was just indulging his kids' interests.

Speaker 3 (23:51):
Yeah, maybe like the apprenticeship approach or something.

Speaker 2 (23:54):
Well, I do know that either by fifteen he started
studying medicine more formally, or that he graduated college at fifteen.
I've read both, all right, So it might be that
he graduated college at fifteen and then entered med school.
I again read a bunch of conflicting things about this man.

(24:15):
And he grew up speaking Cottalan, which is a different
language than Spanish Castilian. I learned this by showing up
in Barcelona and being like, I know a little bit
of Spanish, and people were like, we don't fucking speak
Spanish and I'm like, ah shit uh. For his entire
life he refused to learn to speak Castilian Spanish. Well,

(24:37):
he was Cottalan. The Spanish were the oppressors. But he
also wasn't like he was like chill about it. He
wasn't like, I hate everyone who is Spanish. He just
didn't like the Spanish government. He was, as you might
have guessed, wildly political. He joined a clandestine communist organization,
the BOC, the Workers and Peasants Block, which was the

(24:58):
clandestine wing the larger Catalan Balaria Communist Federation. The Balaric
Islands are islands off the coast of Catalonia, and this
federation had both anarchists and communists in it. There's a
lot of historical getting along and not getting along between
those groups. This particular communist federation worked alongside the anarchists
of the CNTFIA. I know that that's alphabet soup as fuck,

(25:23):
and normally I try to kind of gloss over the
alphabet soup shit. It's kind of my niche interest, but
it does not need to be yours or the listeners.
But the way that these groups relate is going to
affect his life and the outcome of what happens because
he broke with Stalinism. He broke with Stalinism early on.
Stalin tried to get the Communist Federation that he was

(25:45):
part of to go to Madrid and do communist propaganda
in Castilian and so Francescan. A few friends wrote Stalin,
which is a fucking that's a brave move. Yeah, this
man does not put up with people who disagree with him.
The federation itself was afraid to write Stalin back. So
he just wrote Stalin back.

Speaker 3 (26:06):
That's amazing.

Speaker 2 (26:08):
I know he's like twenty two, and he's like, I
disagree with this man.

Speaker 3 (26:12):
Well maybe that's why.

Speaker 2 (26:14):
Yeah, right, you're twenty two.

Speaker 3 (26:15):
You're like, I'll write a letter to anyone.

Speaker 2 (26:17):
Yeah, totally. So he writes Stalin back and he's like,
you obviously don't know I'm paraphrasing here. You obviously don't
know shit about Spain. We're not going to go and
say all power to the Soviets in Madrid. We don't
have Soviets, which is the name for like a specific
style of like a workers council, Okay, and we're definitely

(26:37):
not going to go and speak Castilian in Madrid. That
is the oppressor's language. We're not doing that for you, buddy.
By nineteen thirty five, when he's twenty three or so,
he's now working at the Paramatta Institute, the place he'd
been going ever since he was little. So he like
he had a fucking plan, and he fucking followed the plan.
Mm hmm. He's learning under a bunch of refuees who

(27:00):
have fled Nazism from Austria and Germany, and he helped start.
I know you wanted another acronym, so here's another acronym,
the POME, the POUM, the Worker's Party of Marxist Unification,
which were basically the communists who don't like Stalin and
were down to work and the broader left, including with anarchists.

(27:22):
And he wrote about and I just like this part
because women are written out of history, so I have
to like go and find the places that where they're
not written out of history. And props to this man.
Women are written out of the story, but not by him.
He tried to include women in this story whenever possible.
So he wrote about how within his clandestine group there

(27:43):
was a specific women's liberation movement that was sex positive.
He said that there was a quote group of women
who talked about sex and the freedom to get laid.
It was a kind of women's liberation front made up
of anarchists women or anarchists from the block Block being
the group. The political situation in Spain is complicated at

(28:03):
this point in history. This is not a thing that
I don't think Americans get end up learning about in school.
But if you listen to this podcast regularly, you've heard
me do like eight episodes about this fucking thing. Spain
had been a monarchy for a long ass time, starting
in the nineteen thirties, they're like nineteen thirty one or so,
it became a republic. It was not a very stable

(28:23):
republic because the far right and the far left kept
trying to take it over. The far right kept trying
to take it over. The far left actually, rather than
trying to take it over, kept kind of trying to
declare independence. Like basically anarcho syndicalists who would bake up
the vast majority of some town in a rural area
would be like, we're done with the state. We're putting

(28:45):
up our black and red flag. We're now an independent
Anarcho syndicalists commune kind of like the money Python sketch,
and they just like kept doing this over and over
again and forcing the state to come put them down.
Then in already six three white right wing generals who
were all white, were like, we should stage a coup.

(29:09):
There's a reason I'm talking about this today. I think
the Spanish Civil War is unfortunately wildly relevant to the
American audience right now. They're like, we're going to stage
a coup. Two of those three generals, they're all like,
we're gonna do this together. And then two of them
die mysteriously in plane crashes.

Speaker 4 (29:24):
Oh my god, as will happen when you're having get
a conspiracy with other evil people.

Speaker 2 (29:32):
I know, I wish it'd have been leftists who did that.
I assume. I assume Franco took them out. I don't know.
Maybe it was literally a coincidence that two of the
is probably not a coincidence. And so the third general,
Francisco Franco, he basically invades his own country. He has
an army in North Africa and he shows up and

(29:53):
he's like, I'm fucking taken over Spain. He has this
famous quote, I am willing to kill one half of
country to rule the other half of the country.

Speaker 3 (30:03):
Yep, I see why that feels very relevant right now?

Speaker 2 (30:07):
Yeah, I know, Lord. His coup failed in large part
due to the organizing of the far left, especially in
Barcelona and Catalonia in general. Barcelona's the capital of Catalonia.
In Barcelona, anarchists and cops, an unlikely alliance that no
one wants to talk about, huh, fought off the fascists,

(30:31):
and so they show up and they're like, we're just
going to roll in and take over, and instead people
are like, we're gonna shoot you if you do that.
And the coup was defeated, but a civil war broke
out instead, And if you're playing cool people bingo, check
off the basically free square in the middle. Margaret talks
about the Spanish Civil War because that's what we're gonna do.

(30:53):
But don't worry if you're playing cool people bingo. There
will be tuberculosis later in this episode, because that's the
other thing that somehow comes up all the time in.

Speaker 4 (31:02):
History, well as John Green's latest book, Everything Is Tuberculosis.

Speaker 2 (31:07):
Yes, no, I haven't read it yet, but like, tuberculosis
has been a running theme and I'm just like, I
didn't expect it when I first started doing this show, Like, oh,
if you read about the nineteenth century and you read
about radicals, they either get killed by the state or
they die of tuberculosis. That's like kind of it.

Speaker 4 (31:24):
Wow, I mean I always that's always like in all
the movies, whenever a character like coughs into a handkerchief
and there's blood, that's tuberculosis, right.

Speaker 2 (31:33):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And it's actually tied into like there's
really cool at ways. It's tied into the show before too,
where like the Young Lords were this Puerto Rican independence
radical group that's kind of parallel to the Black Panthers
in the late sixties early seventies, And one of the
things that they would do in New York is that
the Puerto Rican communities they were part of were under

(31:54):
like no one was screening them for tuberculosis, but like
white neighborhoods were getting this like tuberculosis, We're going around
in X raying people. And so they just hijacked one
of those vans and they brought it to their neighborhood
and the people working in the van were like sweet
fuck yeah, Like they're not mad, They're like, I want
to go where help. You know, you don't become a
tuberculosis ambulance driver because you because you just only want

(32:19):
to help rich people, you know.

Speaker 3 (32:21):
I love that.

Speaker 2 (32:22):
Yeah. So the Civil War breaks out and the Marxists
and the anarchists. I'm going to separate Marxists from communists
like the Stalinists, right, The Marxists and the Anarchists form
militias and they rush off to the front and they
stop the fascists from sweeping across the country. The POM,

(32:45):
which our guy Francesca is part of. They are mostly
famous in history because this is the group that the
young George Orwell came down and joined.

Speaker 3 (32:55):
Oh wow, yeah, that's cool.

Speaker 2 (32:58):
We have a whole like two parter about him. It's
always funny when right wing politicians try to cite Orwell
right because Orwell literally went to Spain to throw grenades
at fascists and his opinions about fascists never changed ever.

Speaker 3 (33:14):
People quote him from the right wing.

Speaker 2 (33:16):
Yeah, because he also was, like I'm gonna put this
in air quotes. He was anti communist in that he
was anti the USSR's regime, the dictatorial regime. He was
an anti authoritarian, and he was a socialist and like
kind of a democrat, you know, And so he didn't
like Stalinists because they, well, I'll get to what happened

(33:37):
to Orwell with the Stalinists. And a little bit, so
Orwell comes down and he joins the poom and he
throws grenades at fascists, so young French esque. He rushes
off to the front with everybody else, desperate to stop
Catalonia from falling to the fascists. Meanwhile, the anarchists take
control of most of Catalonia and create a non hierarchical
society within the Spanish Republic. I am uncertain if Francesca

(34:01):
ever took up arms. I'm guessing not. I think basically,
since he was a doctor, he's doing doctor stuff right away, right,
which is absolutely just as important. But most of what
I found out about his life is in French, so
I don't have all of the details of this period,
but I do know that soon enough or right away,
he starts doing psychiatry at the front lines, like three

(34:22):
kilometers from the actual front. Wow, he's really interested in
what happens during war. I'm just going to read this
quote because I find it interesting. Quote. Science is a
behavioral disorder for some people who become obsessed with it.
They want to control everything through science. War is uncontrollable.

(34:44):
But as the surrealists would say, exquisite corpses appear, that
is to say, the unexpected free association, which are not
pure fancy. They are more real than the real. And
so he's kind of just like into the strange case.
I don't think he's like pro it, but he's like
interested in the strange chaotic formations that happen that are

(35:06):
outside what you can like assume you can just control.

Speaker 4 (35:09):
Well, it's also so interesting I find like the difference
of how people act by themselves and how they act
when they're in a group totally, because it's.

Speaker 3 (35:18):
Really drastically different. Dolphin.

Speaker 2 (35:21):
Yeah, no, absolutely, Like groups have their own characters and
psychoses and like issues, which is prescient. That's going to
tie into the style of psychotherapy that he develops. Oh
but you know what he didn't develop, You know what
only came later.

Speaker 3 (35:39):
Ads?

Speaker 2 (35:40):
Well, ads themselves probably already existed, but these ads in
particular probably weren't around during the Spanish Civil War, and
if they were, they were probably for very different things.
But time always changes, and these are the ads that
we have here, they are and we're back. So we

(36:05):
didn't have the word PTSD back then. Well, it's not
a word, it's a Oh, it's not even an acronym.
I will probably die still calling a series of letters
an acronym, even if it doesn't spell anything.

Speaker 3 (36:15):
But oh, an acronym has to be a word.

Speaker 2 (36:19):
Yeah, according to Pendence and maybe people who are correct,
but I'm just going to call it an acronym or whatever.
No one had PTSD back then. In World War One
in English, you would have called it shell shock. Francesque
called it being war neurotic, and he developed a lot
of ideas about how to treat war neurotics, and as

(36:41):
far as I can tell, he was pretty effective. He wrote,
and this is a bit of a confusing translation. It
wasn't a machine translation, but it just isn't perfect. He wrote, quote,
if you sent a war neurotic one hundred and fifty
kilometers from the front line, you make it a chronic case.
You can only treat him near the family where the
troubles occurred. And I just think family is like nonsory

(37:04):
the but the source right interesting, you're saying you got
to you gotta do it where it happens.

Speaker 4 (37:10):
Yeah, there's like debate around like how quickly to offer
mental health services after like a big trauma.

Speaker 2 (37:17):
Ooh interesting, you know, like some.

Speaker 4 (37:18):
Like big natural disaster or something, and like sometimes doing
it right away can be helpful, but sometimes it can
actually be damaging, and so there's like not a clear
way to address it.

Speaker 2 (37:30):
Yeah, and he's just like he's exploring, He's like, how
the hell do I save all of these people?

Speaker 1 (37:35):
You know?

Speaker 2 (37:36):
Yeah, And soon enough he becomes the chief physician for
the Army psychiatric services, not just for the POME like
the militia that he's part of, but the entire Republican Army,
like the entire Spanish army. Right, oh wow, And did
you know that I'm in my forties and have been
a professional writer for a decade and I still cannot
spell physician or psychiatric.

Speaker 4 (37:59):
I have a master's degree in psychology and I can't
spell psychiatric.

Speaker 2 (38:03):
Yeah. No, it's hard. It's a hard one.

Speaker 3 (38:05):
I can't do it.

Speaker 2 (38:06):
It's weird because I'd be like I could probably spell psychology.

Speaker 3 (38:09):
Sometimes I can't. Yeah, it's really embarrassing.

Speaker 2 (38:13):
It's terrible. I'm you know, always say I hate the
bourgeoisie because I can't spell him. And so he starts
setting up not just one clinic, but just like all
of the clinics, right, And his whole thing is that
he believes in the idea that the place matters, and
that the character of the place is part of the cure,

(38:37):
and the community matters and is part of the cure,
and that people psychiatric needs are sort of a community
problem with community solutions. So he starts setting up all
of these clinics and helping people care for people, and
he doesn't pick the caregivers, the psychiatric nurses and stuff
from psychiatrists because he's like he kind of hates doctors

(39:00):
and psychiatrists his whole life. He specifically is like psychiatrists
and doctors have a fear of madness, is what he
keeps saying.

Speaker 3 (39:09):
That's so true.

Speaker 4 (39:11):
Yeah, that feels like very insightful in a lot of
ways because it doesn't follow the certain rules of like
you know, tuberculosis or right, it manifests so differently.

Speaker 2 (39:25):
Yeah, totally, which is like it gets out of his
quote about like war is not you can't science it,
you can't math it, you know, I mean there's math involved,
but like mostly with artillery. And so when he's picking
psychiatric nurses and psychiatric care and he's teaching all along,
he's very into like breaking walls and like teaching psychiatric
methods to everyone he can. He picks. One of the

(39:48):
groups he picks is lawyers who are afraid to go
pick up a gun but still care about the cause,
which is really relatable. He also picks like literary scholars
and painters and musicians and shit. And he also picks
priests and nuns, and there's like whole convents that get
turned into psychiatric care facilities. And he also picks sex workers.

(40:11):
I believe brothels were illegal in Spain in the Spanish
Republic and probably in the monarchy before that, but the
anarchists controlled regions legalize sex work and just and allowed
this cool thing where they set up the Syndicate La Moore,
the Union of Love, in which sex workers were protected
legally and allowed them to set their own rates. But

(40:34):
when he's setting it up as psychiatric care facilities, he's like,
all right, no one knows these men better than the
women who sleep with them. And there are women fighting
in the militias as well, but they're not the majority
of the units, so the brothels can stay open. Three
or four workers there will get trained as psychiatric nurses

(40:55):
and they're not allowed to sleep with the people who
are their psychiatric clients, you know. But they are like
not like told that they can't work that way anymore
or something like that, right, they're just like, oh, you
can't sleep with these people because you're there like therapist.
You know, this is brilliant.

Speaker 3 (41:12):
I know, I know, I really love it.

Speaker 2 (41:15):
I know. I was like, this story has radical nuns,
it has sex workers.

Speaker 4 (41:19):
It has like, well, I imagine sex workers deal with a
lot of people's mental health yas they're various issues.

Speaker 2 (41:27):
Yeah, they do, that is and I mean literally their
safety depends on understanding the mental health of their clients
and things like that too.

Speaker 1 (41:33):
You know.

Speaker 3 (41:34):
That's so true.

Speaker 2 (41:35):
And the inclusion of priests and nuns in this part
is also really interesting because there's a lot of right
wing rhetoric around the Spanish Civil War, especially after Franco
wins spoiler alert, Spain falls to fascism for most of
the twentieth century. They basically claim that the leftists, especially
the anarchists, just run around and killed all the priests

(41:56):
and nuns that they just like slaughtered them all. So
the left wing position is, no, we didn't do that,
but we killed a lot of fascist priests because a
lot of the priests in a given small town would
be basically elements of the fascist state, which is true.
But I also suspect that there was a lot of
war crimes. There's a war, there's war crimes. People are

(42:18):
going to do absolutely terrible things. But there's also this
thing where like when you read a like leftist history,
they never want to admit that there's like rad Christians
and rad religious people, you know, really so the priests
and nuns, not never, but especially specifically communist stuff again
with capital C communism or whatever. And then in Spain

(42:40):
it's a particularly complicated thing because Franco was a Catholic fascist.
Like Franco is actually honestly a closer comparison to modern
Christian nationalism because it was specifically Christian in nature. Franco
is specifically Catholic in nature, although he actually resisted the
Catholic Church a lot. But that's besides the point.

Speaker 3 (43:01):
Well, he can't have anyone have control over him.

Speaker 2 (43:04):
No exactly. Actually that was the thing is that the
Pope was like, well, I get to control who's you know,
your bishops and stuff, because I'm the pope, And Franco
was like, no, I get to control because I'm the
fascist dictator anyway, So things didn't stay rosy during the war.
War is never rosy. It's actually just really bad. By

(43:26):
nineteen thirty seven, Stalin tried taking over the left in Spain. Basically,
he was like, I'm in charge of all of this.
You need to come under my command or I'll kill you,
all right, to all of this, like diverse groups of
people of different like Marxist and anarchists and all these
people who are doing all this other stuff and are
the people who had stopped the fascists. We've covered this

(43:49):
a lot in other episodes. But soon enough he's sending
secret police from Russia to Spain to round up all
the anti Stalinists and kind of a prequel to the
Great Purge he started doing in Russia the next year,
in nineteen thirty eight. Ironically, most of the people that
Stalin sent to go torture and disappear leftists in Spain
themselves got tortured and disappeared by Stalin like a year later,

(44:13):
isn't that wild?

Speaker 4 (44:14):
Yeah, how that just seems to always happen.

Speaker 2 (44:17):
Yeah, the leopards eating the face party does yep? Uh huh.
I always like shitting on Stalin, but I am not
including this just to shit on him.

Speaker 1 (44:27):
More.

Speaker 2 (44:28):
It is important to understanding france Esque's character and his
therapy and his ideas, to understand that he was someone
who lived through occupation after occupation, through one authoritarian regime
after another, from Stalin coming and saying like I am
in charge of all of the left, to Franco and

(44:48):
then to the Vichy France and the Nazi controlling of France.
The POM, the group that he was part of, was
specifically singled out for abuse by the Stalinists. Important POME
leaders were being disappeared and tortured. So George Orwell, right,
he's off at the front. His wife is here too,
and she's just like left out of all the history
books too, and it's really fucking annoying. And she's like

(45:11):
doing a lot of important work, just like not at
the front with a rifle or whatever. You know, God forbid.
So George Orwell, who wasn't shitty to his wife about this?
It's just historians who are. He gets shot through the
neck by a fascist right while he's fighting at the front,
and then he goes and he survives that, and he's
recovering at a hospital, and while he's recovering, the Stalinists

(45:31):
basically declare war on the Pome that he's fighting with,
and there's a warrant out for his arrest, and so
his wife helps smuggle him out of the country under
an assumed name, and the two of them leave Spain.
And this is why Orwell became a leftist anti communist
because yep, they tried to kill him after he had
taken a bullet through the neck fighting fascism.

Speaker 4 (45:55):
It's almost like, when you're any type of extreme you
lose sight.

Speaker 3 (46:00):
Of the plot.

Speaker 2 (46:02):
Yeah, totally, Yeah, just fucking authoritarianism will when you think
that you are so right that everyone has to do
what you say. You know, yep, and so Orwell wasn't
the only PUH militant whose wife smuggled him too safety.
Enter Helene Tuscaus Francesque's wife who was Spanish and not Catalan.

(46:23):
She's practically not in the story at first until you
look really hard to find her in the story. Why
would you include women when you write history. I can't imagine. Fortunately,
did you know, Alison Raskin that women can write for themselves?

Speaker 4 (46:40):
I keep hiring someone to do it for me. I
had no idea.

Speaker 2 (46:48):
Okay, what's funny about this is right after I came out,
I got hired to write male point of view romance
as a ghost writer. And so I think that secretly
at least one male name was secretly a woman writing it.
But like I suspect that it's more common in the
romance field than anyone will. I don't want to name names.

(47:11):
Yeah I have.

Speaker 4 (47:13):
I don't even know if I know of like any
male romance writers really.

Speaker 2 (47:17):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (47:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (47:19):
As soon as I came out, they were like, can
you write male romance? And I was like, god damn it.
I was like, I mean, in a weird way, I'm
in like a really good position to do it because
I'm like, well, I kind of understand the male point
of view, like you know, I got exposed to it
a lot. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (47:34):
Locker room talk.

Speaker 2 (47:35):
Yeah, actually no, locker room talk has always avoided me.
I think men have always known I'm not a safe
person to say that shit around, not even because I've
been like a fiery feminist, but just because like no
one's ever mistaken me as one of the boys, like
that is not a thing that has ever happened.

Speaker 3 (47:52):
To me, and you aren't, So yeah, you know.

Speaker 2 (47:57):
I absolutely spent gym class sitting in the corner painting
my nails with the other goth girls, and no one
knew why I was there, including me, but it made
more sense. So I was able to find some letters
written by Marie Rose Riba, which is his daughter, and
shout out to the author Ben Platts Mills, who was

(48:19):
the one who wrote her and published her letters. Will
Francesca was at the front. Helene and his daughter Mary
Rose lived with his parents in their haberdashing and life
during wartime fucking sucked, whether you're at the front or not.
Rus the town whose name I can pronounce, was under
a blockade and supplies were short. The family got by

(48:42):
by selling what she sewed and selling off what she
accumulated in her life, like basically all of the stuff
of their life. She is just like slowly selling in
order so that she and her kid can eat. She
would also sneak out across the blockade to a small
village in the hinterlands because she had connection there with
the local priests, because the brother of the chaplain of

(49:04):
Paramatta Institute, where her husband worked, he lived there, and
the priest would give her supplies to smuggle back into Ruis. Or,
as her daughter put it, Helene came back to her
in laws loaded like a mule, and so she's smuggling
food in past the blockades from the fascists. As the
fascist bombed Rues, they would regularly take farm at a

(49:26):
refuge one hundred kilometers away, and there's all these heartbreaking
stories about like the mom is like traveling there with
her like three year old daughter and is like seen
orphan kids by the side of the road, and she's
like terrified she's going to lose her kid. And you know,
it's a like war actually just sucks. You know, we
should avoid it whenever possible. The best efforts of the

(49:47):
Spanish Republic were not enough to hold back the tide
of fascism. It's hard to say whether or not they
could have succeeded if Stalin hadn't betrayed the fight in
the middle of it. But one thing that is certain
an ties into the story is that the ostensibly leftist
government of France. They're run by the Popular Front at
this point, which is this idea that comes up a

(50:08):
lot that isn't a bad plan, which is basically like,
when your country is falling to fascism, all of the
electoral people who are left of fascist form the Popular
Front party and they're like, look, just vote for not
fascist it. Yeah, and it also doesn't even mean vote
for the most watered down democrat or whatever. It literally

(50:30):
means like Democrats voting for socialists, socialist voting for communists,
communist voting for Democrats, Like it means like whoever's running,
if they're not a fascist, radical left or center left,
you're voting for them. In that time, But there was
a Popular Front in Spain that is like how they
ended up with the republic right. There was a Popular

(50:51):
Front in France that was how they didn't fall electorally
to fascism. Later they're going to actually, both popular fronts
fell militarily to fascism. It's almost like when they don't
get their way, they pull out guns. Uh huh. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (51:07):
This is a scary time, both the story you're telling
and the one that we're living through.

Speaker 2 (51:12):
Yeah. So the Popular Front government of France did nothing
to help Spain. And this is a big sticking point
and problem in history. Basically, the Western governments like the
UK and France were like, you know, all, we're gonna
sit this one out, and they actually specifically set up
a blockade that no war materials was allowed to go

(51:35):
to either side, which sounds fair, but it's not. It
cripples the left, not the right, because the right is
getting their war material from Germany and Italy. And also,
this is why Stalin had such an outsized impact is
there actually weren't really many communists or Stalinists in Spain.
It was mostly sort of social democrats and anarchists in
Spain at the time. But Stalin was like, yo, I

(51:57):
got tanks and shit, and people were like, all right,
we fucking need him, you know. So the Popular Front
of France did nothing to fucking help Spain. Neither did
the UK. The great leftist powers just let Spain fall,
despite the best efforts of a lot of anti fascist
volunteers from those countries and other countries, including the first

(52:17):
black man to command a mixed white and black troops
in an American unit, came from the US and fought
in the Spanish Civil war, and like there's like all
kinds of stories of just amazing volunteers. As Franco's forces
swept across the country, the retreat the Ritarata began. Three

(52:39):
hundred thousand civilians and two hundred thousand militants escaped across
the border into France. Helene didn't go with Franchesc at first,
since she wasn't in immediate danger. There was a death
warrant out for him because he'd been a high up
person on the anti fascist side, right, So Franco's like,

(52:59):
am owe you, and he's like, I think I'm gonna
leave the country now. It's it's been pleasant, but I
gotta go. So Helene doesn't go at first. He's to
go first and figure out the plan, like Okay, where
are we gonna go when we get there, and then
send her a signal to come herself with their daughter.
So Francesque and a friend crossed the highest point of

(53:20):
the Pyrenees mountains because fascists were bombarding the route that
most people were using to escape. Like again, this is
just how fucking like when he said I'm willing to
kill half a Spain to rule the other half, he
meant it like everyone trying to leave the country, They're
like not even trying to fight him anymore. He's like,
I'm just gonna blow up all of them. Fuck them.

Speaker 1 (53:40):
So.

Speaker 2 (53:40):
Francesque's daughter Mary Rose relates the following story that her
mother told about her father when he crosses into France.
Quote a gold bracelet that she had sewn into the
lining of his coat so that he could sell it
for his needs. He asked the first shepherd he found,
what is that worth? Nothing? Was the reply. So here,

(54:03):
my dad said, and he gave the bracelet to the shepherd.

Speaker 3 (54:07):
Isn't it Like I try to understand like what that means.

Speaker 2 (54:11):
I know, I know, I think there's like a couple
of things going on with it. I think on some level,
he's like it's possible that gold is like lost value.
Everyone escaping is just like, oh I brought gold with me,
and everyone's like, yeah, it isn't fucking worth anything here.
But also he's just like, all right, or you're a shepherd,
you want this fucking gold thing. Like he's also just

(54:31):
like like I think he's like kind of just being nice,
but he's also maybe a little bit like ah, fuck my,
Like you know, I guess I got nothing.

Speaker 4 (54:39):
Yeah, you know, because do you think he believes the shepherd? Yeah, totally, okay, okay,
But I also like, I'm sure on some level he
knows that gold has value. So it's like, I think
it's also being presented as a like altruistic moment from
her father, but I I'm not one hundred percent certain.

Speaker 3 (54:56):
It's a very confusing story in some ways.

Speaker 2 (54:59):
It really is. So when he's still in the mountains,
a monastery in France takes him and his friend in
and cares for their feet. I don't know the direct trends.
It says phrases like cared for their feet. I don't know,
it's bandage, and I'm washed them if they wash their feet.
It's literally the most Jesusy thing you can do. It's
literally there's a thing about washing people's feet. And then

(55:21):
he comes down out of the mountains and a cop
basically is like, all right, you got two options. You
can go to the Foreign Legion, or you can report
to Septfords, a concentration camp that's been set up for refugees,
And so he and his friend go to Septfords, the
concentration camp before Nazis and their death camp's concentration camp
had a different connotation. It was not a good connotation,

(55:44):
but it wasn't quite the same. It's not a death camp.
A lot of people die there, but that's not the
point of it, right. It's when you just concentrate a
bunch of people in a camp, usually refugees or whatever,
like we have in the United States right now, Septs fawns.
This concentration camp was set up in February nineteen thirty

(56:05):
nine to house Spanish Republicans and German Jews. It was
one hundred and twenty five acres that had been sheep
grazing land. There were fifty kilometers of barbed wire fences.
There was electric fences. There were watch towers and spotlights.
There were a thousand soldiers serving as guards, not to
keep the prisoners safe, but to keep them prisoners. There

(56:26):
was an infirmary, and there was a prison. The whole
thing is a prison, but there's a prison within the prison. Wow.
There's no running water, there's no heat, there's no electricity.
People slept on haystacks, Mud and sand were everywhere. One
inmate wrote, I felt like crying to dry the ink
with which I am writing for tears have turned to sand.

Speaker 3 (56:51):
Yeah, devastating.

Speaker 2 (56:53):
I will say, whenever I read like shit from one
hundred years ago, I'm like, man, the average person knew
how to fucking write.

Speaker 3 (57:00):
Like It's so true, because like, yeah.

Speaker 2 (57:03):
That's how you fucking communicate, like letters and shit. You know.

Speaker 4 (57:06):
I also just wonder if like our a lot of
our like current vocabulary just doesn't feel like it has
the same hift as like the common language back then.

Speaker 2 (57:18):
Oh my god, it might be that way. Like one
hundred years from now, people are going to be like,
oh wow, they used like all the time and their sentences,
and they talked about how things were based. Isn't that
beautiful base?

Speaker 4 (57:29):
I mean, like, but maybe right, yeah, no, no, you're
probably right.

Speaker 2 (57:34):
Like cooked, why do they call things cooked? That's such
an interesting metaphor. Soon enough, this camp needed a cemetery too.
At least eighty one people died there, many by suicide,
and inmates of the camp were forced to work for
the war effort as manual labor, so this world renowned.

(57:55):
At this point. Psychiatrist Francesco Toscaeus is in the camp,
and he immediately sets to work building up a psychiatric
facility in the camp.

Speaker 4 (58:05):
I love this guy. He is like the energizer bunny.
He just doesn't care where he is. He is setting
up a psychiatrist camp.

Speaker 2 (58:15):
Yep, exactly. He gets permission from the warden. The warden
probably didn't give him permission to do everything he did
in a psychiatric care facility though, like help people escape
the camp. And while he was there he hit upon
this realization that's like sort of obvious in retrospect, although

(58:35):
it has not been fully incorporated into modern psychiatric facilities.
Keeping people in captivity is really bad for their mental health,
whether it's a prison, a concentration camp, or an asylum.
And he says all the time he's only there for
like six months or maybe even less. He says all
the time that he did some of his best work
in that camp as a therapist. I've read three different

(58:59):
accounts of how he got out. One was that the
camp was liberated. I think that the count is just wrong.
The camp was liberated in nineteen forty four from the Nazis.
I have not found no collaborating evidence that it was
a corroborating whatever corroborating that it was liberated prior to that.
One account is that he himself escaped, which is entirely possible.

(59:20):
He was helping people escape, he certainly could have. And
one that I find the most likely, which is that
someone from a nearby asylum was like, hey, uh, can
we have that guy? Though he's like good at this stuff,
he got poached. Yeah, yeah, he got poached. Yeah the
job hunters, headhunters, whatever, the uea either way. On January sixth,

(59:43):
nineteen forty, he arrives at Saint Alban, a tiny town
with a mental asylum. Sant Alban is in luz Are,
the least populated part of France, up in the mountains.
It's kind of south central. If you imagine a map.

Speaker 4 (59:56):
Of France, I'll be honest, I can't. Yeah, fair enough,
I don't know what Edny Country looks like.

Speaker 2 (01:00:02):
Yeah, France is kind of a big, almost square blob
with some things sticking out of various sides. Okay, just
in the middle of the bottom in the mountains. Almost
every version of this story that I read, I read
like seven different accounts of this thing, and they were
all like, when he shows up, that place is a

(01:00:23):
dirty shitthole and everything sucks and it's overcrowded. You will
be shocked to know this has never happened before. This
erases the work of a woman who came before him
and set things in motion that he just picked up on.

Speaker 4 (01:00:39):
Well, history does love to repeat itself, as does leaving
women out of history.

Speaker 2 (01:00:45):
I know. And one of the things that I find
that's fascinating is whenever I read about these like early
twentieth century men, they're usually not the ones writing women
out of the story. It's the historians who are obsessed
with great men, like quote unquote great men of history,
at least on the left, who are like passibly feminist,
are passibly feminist, and they like care about shit, and

(01:01:07):
they're like, no, I'm part of a big thing where
women are helping and that absolutely support women, you know.
But then the people who are obsessed with great men
are like this man so good. I don't know why
they have that voice, but that's what they sound like.

Speaker 4 (01:01:20):
Well it makes sense, right, because the people that are
working with those women probably really.

Speaker 3 (01:01:26):
Appreciated their work.

Speaker 4 (01:01:27):
Yeah, yep, and in their head they couldn't write them
out of the story because of how much they were
a part of it.

Speaker 2 (01:01:34):
Yeah. Yeah, So there was this woman named Agnes Masson
she's Italian, but she fled Italy because she was anti fascist,
like literally her passport application or her like naturalization papers
or whatever. In nineteen twenty seven says like reason for leaving,
and it's like not compatible with the current administration of

(01:01:54):
Italy or whatever, because Italy's under Mussolini at this point.

Speaker 3 (01:01:58):
That's such a great line to put that everywhere. Not
compatible with the current administration.

Speaker 2 (01:02:03):
Yet totally.

Speaker 3 (01:02:05):
We should make t shirts.

Speaker 2 (01:02:07):
Yeah, totally. And she is the first woman to direct
a French psychiatric hospital, so imagine leaving her out of
the fucking story. From nineteen thirty three to nineteen thirty six,
she ran San alban She started the long, slow work
of turning the place around. And what she did, both

(01:02:30):
of these people did amazing work. What she did was
like physical infrastructure. She hooked up water and electricity, she
set up like central heating. Is like I think it's
a castle. Like I don't think it's a huge castle,
but it's a castle, you know. She ends solitary confinement,
and she ends the use of straight jackets, and the
way the way she convinces there's like there's nuns who

(01:02:52):
work there, right, the way she convinces the nuns that
they're going to stop using straight jackets rules. She takes
one of the head nuns and she's like, I'm just
gonna leave you in a straight jacket overnight, and then
like the next day she's like, so, what do you
think straight jackets?

Speaker 1 (01:03:08):
Yeah? Your nay?

Speaker 2 (01:03:09):
How you feeling on them? And they're like, all right,
no more fucking straight jackets.

Speaker 3 (01:03:14):
Brilliant technique.

Speaker 2 (01:03:16):
Yeah. She also adds a library to the place, and
later she moves on to another institution and she stays
rad and like she continues to also revolutionize psychiatric care
in France, But why would anyone talk about her even
though she did it like five places instead of just one.
She started at another institution and she started organizing social

(01:03:38):
events that brought people from outside the asylum into the
asylum for like dances and shit, so that they were
part of society of the town that they were part of.
And this was a scandal in the press and the government.
So the government was going to fire her, but the
patient stuck up for her and she got to keep
her job for a while. And she also started letting

(01:03:58):
patients know that how long were going to be held,
that the facility was up to the patient themselves. She'd
be like, all right, how long should you be here?

Speaker 1 (01:04:06):
Like?

Speaker 2 (01:04:06):
What do you need? You know, she's cool. Eventually she
does get fired. She moves from place to place, I
think partly because people keep running her out, and then
eventually she's not able to find work anymore because she's
too based eh based eh. People in the future, that's
like me saying, uh, oh, now I can't come up
with the old timey word.

Speaker 3 (01:04:26):
Oh well, we'll think of subthing. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:04:29):
And so it's this legacy of improvement in anti fascism
and refuge genius that Toscaus walks into. And how the
patients and the doctors then create a secret society to
fuel anti fascist partisan resistance to the Nazis and reinvent
medical care for the mentally ill. We'll talk about on Wednesday.

(01:04:52):
That's my cliffhanger.

Speaker 3 (01:04:54):
It's a good one.

Speaker 2 (01:04:55):
Thank you, thank you. Anyway, how are you feeling about
this so far?

Speaker 4 (01:04:59):
I'm energize and excited. I think this is so awesome,
and sometimes it just sucks to think about all the
things that could have caught on. I know right that
it's not that the thing didn't ever exist. It's like
it was there, we just didn't run with it the
way we ran with the worst option.

Speaker 2 (01:05:14):
I know. It just like this doesn't specifically make money
for private institutions. Like I am guessing that that's the
majority of the fucking difference. But I don't know. Maybe
that's maybe that's the wrong kind of cynical. Maybe it's
some other terrible reason instead.

Speaker 4 (01:05:30):
I'm sure there's a lot of stigma around these people,
you know, back then, totally of just like not being
willing to view them as you know, autonomous human beings
who should be involved in their care.

Speaker 2 (01:05:42):
Yeah. People want really really hard to other mentally ill
people because they want to really really hard thing that
could never be them. It's so much like homelessness. You know.
It's like you thinking the same thing. Yeah, yeah, like, ah,
it can never be me. Whatever happens that person doesn't
matter because that's totally not me because I have a
paycheck coming up, like you know, Like.

Speaker 4 (01:06:05):
And I think that's like the mentality that is like
what arrived us at Trump is like people thinking that
anyone that is suffering in this country deserves it because
they've done something wrong. Yeah, Rather than that the entire
system is rigged against all.

Speaker 2 (01:06:19):
Of us totally. The number of people who are just like,
oh shit, I voted for Trump, but now ice is
coming for someone I care about, or I lost my
job in the federal government, or you know, there's no
way I we wote afford anything as a tariffs or whatever. Like,
And I don't even want to like pathologize or blame.
I'm not like super excited about people vote for Trump,

(01:06:40):
but like, you know, it's like, all right, well, if
someone does a thing and then they learn their lesson,
we got to let them learn their lesson, you know.

Speaker 1 (01:06:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:06:50):
And it also just like I think just like speaks
to how harmful that worldview is that like, you know,
good people get rewarded, bad people get punished, and how
like that's yeah, it's just not how society works.

Speaker 2 (01:07:05):
Yeah. Absolutely, But if people want to reward themselves by
getting a chance to read something that will let them
think about romance and comedy, do you have any suggestions
for them? You know what I do?

Speaker 3 (01:07:21):
I would recommend that they check out my brand new rom.

Speaker 4 (01:07:24):
Com Save the Date, which is more calm than spicy
for people who look if you're here for five chili peppers,
this isn't the book for you, But if you're here,
you know, to see someone fight against some ideas around
romance and marriage and sort of deal with her mental

(01:07:45):
health along the way, then I recommend Save the Date.
And it would mean a lot to me if you
pre ordered it one day before it comes out.

Speaker 2 (01:07:55):
And for anyone who's like, I don't know, what's the
point of pre ordering the day before it comes out,
it's worth knowing that preorders have a really disproportionate impact
on the sort of algorithms that shouldn't run our world,
because what that means is that you get this specific
boost of sales at one moment, and like, you know, well,
you're already a New York Times bestseller. But the best

(01:08:17):
chance to get to be that way is pre orders
buy and large for people. And so I would encourage
anyone who's excited about it to pre order it a
day early. Uh what do I want to promote?

Speaker 1 (01:08:29):
I do?

Speaker 2 (01:08:30):
I just promise that I'm out of my book promotion cycle,
but I do have a book coming out. It's kind
of the inverse of what Save the Data is. If
you are looking to escape by thinking about reflections on
death and magic, I have a book called The Immortal
Choir Holds Every Voice that comes out from the anarchist
publishing collective Strangers in the Tangled Wilderness. I think it

(01:08:51):
comes out June second, but you can preorder it if
you miss the Kickstarter you can preorder it and all
the pre orders through several places. I think AK and
Firestorm books and Strangers in Tangleolderness come with a signature
in the book, so that's a bonus, and I will
have to sit there and sign a whole stack of

(01:09:12):
stickers book plates. But worst problems have happened.

Speaker 4 (01:09:17):
I had to make my signature my initials because my
actual signature is so illegible and ugly that I had
to just like shift it into initials.

Speaker 2 (01:09:29):
It's a good move. I mine is largely illegible, but
I start it with a heart and then the M
is recognizable. That's like how I've always.

Speaker 3 (01:09:37):
Oh that's nice.

Speaker 2 (01:09:38):
Yeah, anyway, we'll be back Wednesday, and with uplifting stories.
This is genuinely one of my favorite stories, and it's oddly,
even though it's taking place in one of the worst
moments in human history, oddly uplifting. So I think you
all like it, and so We'll see you on Wednesday.

Speaker 1 (01:09:58):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff a production of cool
Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit
our website foolzonmedia dot com, or check us out on
the iHeartRadio app, Apple

Speaker 2 (01:10:09):
Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts